From: Phillip Gawlowski Date: 2008-04-21T05:33:13+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby 1.8.7-preview2 has been released -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Alex Fenton wrote: | | Firstly, Akinori, thank you very much for your generous work on ruby. I second that motion. | Anyway, some of this reiterates what's been said elsewhere by others | [1]. It's been suggested in reply that only mission-critical application | developers and rigid corporate types care about stability within branches. | | In fact, this sort of casual branch management imposes a cost borne by | ordinary users (who find libraries randomly don't work with the version | of ruby they happen to have installed) and average library developers | (who can't be sure that they are targetting more than a single | point-version, and end up fielding more support requests). For me, this means that I a) have to advise prospective and current clients to use Ruby 1.8.6, and b) need to cover my backside in regard to security somehow. Fortunately, I can handle quite a bit of that myself, and Ruby's patchlevel is reliable in my experience. Maybe it'd be a good idea to advertise branch management on ruby-lang.org? Together with some guidelines, that'd be a boon to people like me, I'm sure. In the end, though, I have a bit of a harder time selling my Ruby services, and using Ruby in my spare time to hack on projects for the fun of it. Until now, I was lucky, and could pretty much dictate the Ruby version that is in use. But I expect that to change, sooner or later. Can't be lucky all the time. :P As it is, I'll have to take a backseat, and only use other people's libraries or frameworks when working with Ruby. I can't spend my time testing against n versions, and working on fixes to code (if I were developing on Ruby, and testing against 1.8 that'd be a hassle already, adding tests and fixes against 1.8.x, too, increases my workload considerably. Workload that I'm not productive). One decision for me was, using JRuby 1.1 / JRuby 1.0.x. Which, incidentally, provides the sort of release management I needs as a user. :| (I know the differences between releases that I can expect, and can plan accordingly. I don't need to rely on test breaking in interesting ways. Hasn't happened yet, but still..) - -- Phillip Gawlowski Twitter: twitter.com/cynicalryan Yuppie Wannabes: ~ An X Generation subgroup that believes the myth of a yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drinks. ~ -- Douglas Coupland, Generation X -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkgLqJMACgkQbtAgaoJTgL8HkgCfdgCNS3xImiekKjcSOAyxWNLl c4MAnjJYaFWiPrHt9lg6t+KIcHBesyz5 =HQnZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----